Baseless fabric: Joseph Priestley, world religions and the future
Baseless fabric: Joseph Priestley, world religions and the future
Millennial ideas are suddenly not only of antiquarian interest; political unsettlement is commonly accompanied by a wish for transformation, but the threat (or promise) of the millennium is of a transformation of serial time itself. The central texts of this chapter are by the English Dissenting minister and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, mostly from the last decade of his life in the United States. The return to some fundamentals of his Christian faith through essaying comparative studies of Islamic and Hindu scripture depended on a spirit of newly sympathetic inquiry in to other religions and cultures, for a monotheism corrupted and compromised by the Athanasian creed’s invention of the Trinity. While it may be difficult to see his apocalyptic turn as anything other than giving up on the historical Priestley did not confuse the heavenly kingdom with the earthly republic. Rather, this kind of manoeuvre may be best explained in terms that are essentially neither political nor religious: that is, in aesthetic terms, such as in Blake’s 1790s proverb imagining a history and a future guided by the poets rather than dominated by the priests, ‘what is now proved was once only imagined’.
87-103
Bygrave, Stephen
c0c3f93a-dab5-4674-aa79-072f4dc11233
15 December 2023
Bygrave, Stephen
c0c3f93a-dab5-4674-aa79-072f4dc11233
Bygrave, Stephen
(2023)
Baseless fabric: Joseph Priestley, world religions and the future.
In,
Varsamopoulou, Evy
(ed.)
Romantic Futures : Legacy, Prophecy, Temporality.
(Routledge Studies in Romanticism)
1 ed.
Routledge, .
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Abstract
Millennial ideas are suddenly not only of antiquarian interest; political unsettlement is commonly accompanied by a wish for transformation, but the threat (or promise) of the millennium is of a transformation of serial time itself. The central texts of this chapter are by the English Dissenting minister and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, mostly from the last decade of his life in the United States. The return to some fundamentals of his Christian faith through essaying comparative studies of Islamic and Hindu scripture depended on a spirit of newly sympathetic inquiry in to other religions and cultures, for a monotheism corrupted and compromised by the Athanasian creed’s invention of the Trinity. While it may be difficult to see his apocalyptic turn as anything other than giving up on the historical Priestley did not confuse the heavenly kingdom with the earthly republic. Rather, this kind of manoeuvre may be best explained in terms that are essentially neither political nor religious: that is, in aesthetic terms, such as in Blake’s 1790s proverb imagining a history and a future guided by the poets rather than dominated by the priests, ‘what is now proved was once only imagined’.
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e-pub ahead of print date: 14 December 2023
Published date: 15 December 2023
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Local EPrints ID: 489007
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/489007
PURE UUID: e78d59c7-5ff1-44d0-9d06-586e4bd66fa5
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Date deposited: 10 Apr 2024 17:01
Last modified: 27 Apr 2024 01:36
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Editor:
Evy Varsamopoulou
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